1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods of determining the physical location of devices in a computer system. Specifically, this invention relates to systems and methods for determining and displaying the physical location and unique identification numbers of PCI devices in a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Personal computers communicate internally and externally through devices connected to their expansion slots. Various bus standards have been developed to standardize communications between the computer system and devices linked through the computer system's expansion slots. Examples of these bus standards are the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), the Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) and the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) architecture.
In order for computer programs to communicate with devices attached to a PCI bus, every computer program must have a way to uniquely access its corresponding PCI device. For this reason, unique identification numbers are calculated for each function residing on a PCI bus card. This unique number is normally a compilation of the bus number, device number and function number of the particular function within the PCI bus card. However, in a hybrid bus environment, such as a computer with both PCI and ISA buses, this unique identification number may not be truly unique. If two devices within the computer system are inadvertently given the same "unique" identification number, conflicts will arise as the devices are accessed by software programs. For this reason, some operating systems generate a identification number that utilizes more information than simply the bus number, device number and function number to access bus devices.
For example, Novell Netware assigns a unique number known as a hardware instance number ON) to each device located within the computer system. The HIN is normally a number that uniquely identifies a device location in the computer, even within a hybrid bus environment.
Unfortunately, operating systems such as Novell Netware display and monitor the functionality of each device in the system by the device number. A failing device within a computer system will be identified by its unique identification number or HIN. However, there is no way for a technician to easily correlate the physical location of a device in the computer system based on the device's unique identifier or HIN. Thus a need exists for a system that allows a technician to rapidly determine the physical location of a failing device within a computer system.
In addition, features of some operating systems, such as Novell Netware, assign tasks based on the HIN of a particular device. For example, a computer system may have two identical network interface cards (NICs). A technician may want to load a particular piece of software to run on one of the NICs, but not the other. In order to load the software, Netware requires that the technician specify the correct NIC by its hardware instance number. However, because there is no correlation between the HIN and the physical location of a device in the system, the technician must use trial and error to attach the software to the appropriate NIC. Unfortunately, there is no easy mechanism for determining the physical location of a device in the computer system based on a HIN. Therefore, a need exists for a method to identify and correlate HINs with the physical location of devices in a computer system.